Secession,
Anyone?

October 7,
2004

No
topic I write about stirs a more unexpected response than
secession  the right of a state to withdraw from the United States.
You might think the issue was settled forever in 1865, when
the North crushed the South in the Civil War. But many Americans, North
and South, still like the idea, and many others nearly panic at the mere
mention of it.

A few readers think Im
writing with tongue in cheek when I propose secession. Well, though I see
the humor of it, Im not exactly joking. I know its unlikely to
happen, for the time being, but the idea has value as a thought-experiment.
It can help free our minds of the illusion that the present political status
quo was, and is, inevitable.

In history, few things are
inevitable. Or rather, they become inevitable only after a certain point. At
the moment when Soviet tanks rolled into Central Europe in 1945, Soviet
rule became inevitable. It hadnt been inevitable a year earlier.

The defeat of secession was by
no means inevitable in 1860. The North was deeply divided over whether to
accept it, to compromise, or to go to war. Lincoln himself, though he flatly
denied the right of secession, was undecided about how to cope with it.
His tragic decision to attack South Carolina after it seized Fort Sumter
drove the wavering border states, including crucial Virginia, to join the
Confederacy.

Lincoln thought secession could
be suppressed quickly. He miscalculated terribly. The result of his
decision was a long war, spilling an ocean of blood; and though it
eventually saved the Union, after a fashion, it did so in a
way he never intended. He had meant to save the Union as of
old, as he often put it, with a limited federal government and
slavery intact. But the consequences, as in a Shakespearean tragedy, were
the opposite of what he had aimed for. The Federal Government became
powerful enough to overwhelm the states  North as well as South,
as the North discovered too late  and he was forced, against his
will, to issue the Emancipation Proclamation, signaling the end of slavery
in America.

The
historian James McPherson praises Lincoln for achieving
the Second American Revolution. But Lincoln would not have
coveted or welcomed such praise. The essence of tragic action, according
to the great Shakespeare commentator A.C. Bradley, is that men
may start a course of events but can neither calculate nor control
it. That exactly describes what Lincoln did when he chose to
oppose secession with military force, whatever the cost. And the cost
proved incommensurate to the very purposes that impelled him to make
that choice.

We tend to forget the sheer
instability of the situation Lincoln faced in the spring of 1861. Different
choices would have borne different results, for better or worse.
Everything was contingent on how he decided to react to the Southern
challenge. He made what proved the most fatal, and bloody, choice
available, with results neither he nor anyone else could have predicted
 results that continue even now.

History judges Lincoln kindly
because one of those results was the end of slavery. But Lincoln was
against sudden emancipation; he wanted gradual emancipation, with
slaveowners compensated and ex-slaves resettled outside the United
States. The course of the war, however, gave him no choice; after two
years, the end of slavery on other terms became inevitable. He could no
longer postpone it.

One of the many ironies of
history is that Lincoln now gets credit, verging on sanctification, for
doing what he never wanted to do and for producing a political system so
radically different from the one he hoped to preserve. If, as he said at
Gettysburg, the Civil War was a test of whether the original American
system  the new nation of 1776  could
long endure, it failed the test.

At one time, our present
situation would have seemed not only improbable but nearly impossible
 anything but inevitable. We are here, and we are what we are, not
because of inexorable fate, but because of countless decisions, errors,
accidents, and contingencies that combined to produce a world nobody had
dreamed of. It might have been inconceivably different.

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